Linux Mint 16 and Raid 1..possible?

newbeeman · 03-22-2014, 12:52 PM

I am getting frustrated looking for up to date Raid information, most I find was written in the dark ages.
Where do I look for information on a Gigabyte mother board raid set up and Linux Mint 16.
Most of the information I find say it's not possible, but when opening the motherboard install disc I note Linux drivers! If drivers are supplied, surely it must be possible.
Please don't advise going to the Gigabyte web site or forum. That's a complete waste of time!! Ignored....

cascade9 · 03-23-2014, 06:08 AM

'motherobard RAID' is mostly 'fakeRAID', and its no better and in many ways worse than using software RAID with linux (mdadm).

Quote:

BIOS / firmware RAID aka fake raid cards:

offer a few performance benefits (like CPU, bus and RAM offloading), but may often be much slower than SW raid (link?)
if the 'raid' card or motherboard dies then you often have to find an exact replacement and this can be tricky for older cards
if drives move to other machines the data can't easily be read
there is usually no monitoring or reporting on the array - if a problem occurs then it may not show up unless the machine is rebooted *and* someone is actually watching the BIOS boot screen (or until multiple errors occur and your data is lost)
you are entrusting your data to unpatchable software written into a BIOS that has probably not been tested, has no support mechanism and almost no community.
having seen how many bugs the kernel works around in various BIOSes it would be optimistic to think that the BIOS RAID has no bugs.

Given the point of RAID is usually to reduce risk it is fair to say that using fakeraid is a terrible idea and it's better to focus energy on either true HW raid or in-kernel SW raid .... but there is nothing stopping you

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

syg00 · 03-23-2014, 05:53 PM

Having just built a Gigabyte z87 based system, I just ignored the on-board raid chip for reason similar to the above. I also like the flexibility of deciding which partitions/drives I include in the array.
In my case I use btrfs RAID5 rather than mdadm - a philosophical difference on where (at what layer in the software stack) I reckon this should be done.

syg00 · 03-23-2014, 06:31 PM

Just checked the user manual, no mention of Linux drivers - maybe they've dropped the support on newer boards. You should still be able to use dmraid on Petra though I would think - here is a Ubuntu doco you may have already read. User contribution at the bottom of the page indicates 12.04 works ok on my motherboard, so you should be able to follow along.

newbeeman · 03-27-2014, 04:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by syg00

Just checked the user manual, no mention of Linux drivers - maybe they've dropped the support on newer boards. You should still be able to use dmraid on Petra though I would think - here is a Ubuntu doco you may have already read. User contribution at the bottom of the page indicates 12.04 works ok on my motherboard, so you should be able to follow along.

OK so I will change direction and use mdadm as I can find some good instructions to follow. One question I cannot find an answer to...Is it possible to do this on completed install, or should I re-install from scratch?

syg00 · 03-27-2014, 07:00 PM

Takes a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, but can be done. See this for example.